“What did the brothel look like?”
“White, maybe stucco, one story.”
“Did he describe the area where the brothel was?”
“It was dark and he was drunk.”
“What were the other buildings in the area made out of? Cinder block? Brick? Stucco?”
“I didn’t think to ask specifically. Why?”
“In Caracas, according to what I read, different slums are made with different materials depending on when they were built. That could’ve helped us.”
“I think he said the surrounding buildings were made of gingerbread.”
Taylor looked out the window, frustrated. Brodie could appreciate why. She’d clearly already begun her obsessive dive into the finer points of Caracas’ urban topography, and the only reason she wasn’t present for the man-to-man interview with Al Simpson was that she was a woman. Also, Simpson’s original false statement threw his whole credibility into question, and maybe Taylor wasn’t keen to put so much faith in the rum-soaked memory of a married businessman who was trying to forget what he was asked to remember.
Brodie considered himself a rational man, but over the years he’d gained a certain respect for the value of hunches, gut instincts, and the certainty of a man’s sight through the dim, smoky light of a brothel. Sure, there were times when your sole witness was shit and unreliable, and you had to take a step back, reassess. But Kyle Mercer was out there, a fugitive with lethal skills, and he’d already gotten a couple of men killed and killed a few himself. This was the only lead they had, and you had to run down every lead, even if it took you to hell, or New Jersey, or Caracas.
CHAPTER 8
They took the I-78 Expressway east toward Newark Liberty International Airport. It was a little past rush hour, and traffic wasn’t bad.
Taylor was scrolling through some articles on her tablet, reading up on their destination. She asked, “Did you pack toothpaste? First aid items? Literally anything and everything you could possibly need?”
Brodie flashed back to his rushed packing job after his meeting with Dombroski, which involved throwing things at an open suitcase and zipping up whatever made it in.
She continued, “We have to assume it will be hard to come by even basic items once we land. Shops are bare. Lines for the few items available can stretch for hours. It looks like a problem even money can’t solve.”
“Money solves everything.”
“Not where we’re going,” said Taylor. “Let’s stop at a pharmacy.”
“Let’s not.”
“We could also get an overnight bag and fill it with extra stuff. Food, first aid supplies. Might pay for a little goodwill on the streets of Caracas.”
Brodie thought about that. “Not a bad idea.”
“You might even say it’s a good idea.”
“You might.”
Brodie got off the expressway a few miles short of the airport, and their GPS found them a CVS drugstore in a shopping center near the exit. They stocked up on some essentials and found an overnight bag to fill with over-the-counter meds, bandages, batteries, canned goods, and snacks. They each took out four hundred dollars from the ATM in case they needed to bribe their way through passport control or customs when they landed in Caracas.
They paid with Brodie’s government credit card and left the drugstore. Brodie threw the overnight bag in the back seat and thought about thecontents. Razors. Aspirin. Tissue packets and candy bars. It depressed him, this cheap drugstore haul three minutes off the expressway that would become precious cargo once they landed. He had come face to face with American poverty and misery in the course of his work, from trailer parks in Alabama to the worst housing projects the Bronx had to offer. But going abroad had exposed him to new depths, to places where civilization and human dignity struggled to exist. Places where there was no bottom.
As they got back on the expressway, Brodie thought about the man behind this mission. Kyle Mercer. Middle-class San Diego kid. Wannabe soldier who got to live out his military fantasies in the real world, and excelled. What did it mean, really, that trajectory? Aspiring to something like that, having an idea of the warrior you wanted to be, and then becoming it?
Brodie’s relationship with soldiering had been very different. He was raised in Liberty, New York, a historic small town west of the Hudson Valley. He was the only child of Clara and Arthur Brodie, a couple of hippie holdouts who bought an old farmhouse in the early Seventies and fixed it up themselves, then used the land to grow vegetables and raise chickens. They sold some produce to a local grocer and did odd jobs around town for cash or used clothing. “We came up here for Woodstock and never left” was a moldy old joke that Brodie heard from his father too many times throughout his childhood, though it really wasn’t far from the truth.
It was a pleasant and idyllic childhood in many ways. Collecting eggs from the chickens, harvesting vegetables in the morning that would find their way into a stew that night, playing on what felt like limitless land. They never had much money, but he didn’t know that.
By the time he came of age, he was growing tired of this semi-rural, semi-subsistence existence in a place that missed out on the gentrification of the Hudson Valley towns and that was growing increasingly underpopulated and poor. His parents had left Greenwich Village to reconnect with nature and, he would understand later, unplug from the political and spiritual battles of the 1960s, which they felt had been lost by the end of the decade. He wanted to make that journey in reverse, to engage with a world he felt isolated from.
With his parents’ blessing, and a combination of loans and scholarships, he moved to Manhattan and attended NYU, right in the middle of his parents’ old bohemian stomping ground of Greenwich Village. It was a world ofexciting firsts. First girlfriend. First time trying drugs. First mugging. But there was something surprising and disappointing too, especially about those native to the city and the surrounding upscale suburbs—a kind of urban provincialism shared by many of his classmates, people who did not look beyond themselves because they thought they were the center of the world.
In his senior year, the world came to them. He was just waking up in his tiny fifth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side when the first plane hit the North Tower. He was down on the street with hundreds of onlookers when the second plane struck, and running from a wall of smoke, dust, and debris when both towers collapsed and blotted out the sun.
